‘The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage,’ by Sydney Padua

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By Lauren Redniss

June 5, 2015

In the late 1970s, a French computer scientist under contract to the United States Defense Department developed Ada, a programming language for military computer systems. Today the language is widely used in “safety critical” settings: in the military, in banks and nuclear power plants, in medical devices and air traffic control. Ada was named for the woman who has been called the world’s first computer programmer, Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace ­(1815-52), daughter of Lord Byron.

When she was a teenager, Lovelace met the engineer and inventor Charles Babbage, the designer of machines that are considered to be progenitors of today’s computers. Their friendship and intellectual collaboration is the subject of Sydney Padua’s “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage,” initially published online as a comic strip, now expanded into a graphic novel.

The book’s images are in black and white. Padua depicts Babbage’s machine, the Analytical Engine, as a clanging, sputtering steampunk contraption. It is a massive assemblage of gears and cogs, with spiral staircases and seemingly infinite internal corridors. Padua’s figures have large round eyes and speak in gasps that end with exclamation points. Lovelace smokes a pipe and has a tiny waist. Babbage is oafish, with a square head and wavy hair. They scowl and grin like silent film stars.

The drawn panels adhere to certain conventions of superhero comics. Sound effects are written in: “BANG! BANG!,” “RRRROOAR!,” “WHOOSH!,” “TING!” The figures are often bathed in sharp, theatrical spotlights; their body language is exaggerated and elastic. In one scene, pairs of eyeballs peer out of the darkness.

A preface provides a biographical sketch of Lovelace and Babbage. Padua then launches into what she calls the “Pocket Universe,” a fictionalized realm where the two “live to complete the Analytical Engine, and naturally use it to HAVE THRILLING ADVENTURES AND FIGHT CRIME!!” The adventures, for the most part, are slapstick encounters with eminent Victorians who visit Babbage’s workshop. The Duke of Wellington rides in on horseback, demanding Babbage and Lovelace help stabilize the global economy. Karl Marx makes a cameo. Dickens and George Eliot stop by, in a confusing episode with gags about cats and punch cards. Queen Victoria shows up, announcing: “We intend to DOUBLE the Engine’s funding, as we perceive how useful it shall be in Our little scheme to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!”

The characters’ speech frequently takes the form of quotations from their real-life published writings. This can make for awkward dialogue. At one point, Babbage shouts at Queen Victoria: “In mathematical science, it happens that truths which are at one period the most abstract, and apparently the most remote from all useful application, become in the next age the bases of profound physical inquiries, and in the succeeding one, perhaps, by proper simplification and reduction to tables, furnish their ready and daily aid to the artist and the sailor!!!” Babbage and Lovelace toss around anachronistic tech terms like “beta test release” and “the Cloud!” Lovelace gets frustrated because Twitter hasn’t been invented yet.

Padua seems more absorbed by her footnotes than by the story itself. The bottom portions of most pages are overtaken by lengthy notes. (This creates a design issue: Pages without footnotes are left with a swath of blank white at the bottom, making them appear incomplete.) Each chapter also has a section for endnotes; some of the endnotes have additional footnotes. At the back of the book there are appendices — also footnoted.

Padua herself is uneasy about the extent of the notes. She interrupts one endnote in midsentence: “Oh, geez, it’s too complicated.” Later she writes, “It’s hard to know what sort of detail to cram into the footnotes.” She chose to cram in a lot. In the notes, we learn about the history of flow charts and the naming of the planet Uranus. We learn about the origins of the British postal system. We learn about a 1980s thought experiment called “the Chinese Room.”

Much of this material is interesting, but it reads as a more or less unedited jumble. The impression it gives is that Padua was captivated by her research and couldn’t bear to leave much out, however peripheral to the main story line. Eventually a reader must give up trying to follow a narrative and read “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage” primarily as a miscellany of historical curiosities.

The book has some inspired moments. Toward the end, Padua begins using visual puns to illustrate her themes. Lovelace draws a picture frame and walks through it into another dimension. She tumbles through space along an axis of imaginary numbers. She pokes at a calligraphic “0” and muses on the nature of zero: “Lying at the axis of everything,” Padua explains, “zero is both real and imaginary. Lovelace was fascinated by zero; . . . it had a spiritual dimension.”

There is an intriguing book lurking here. Padua found a good story — her characters led fascinating lives — and she gestures toward big questions: What is the relationship between science and imagination? Was mathematics invented or discovered?

But Padua has a habit of undermining herself and her project. She calls herself “The Lady Novelist, . . . Yours Truly the Indefatigable Footnoter.” Such self-­deprecating cracks — and there are many — fall flat. Worse, Padua extends the joke to her entire book: “Though I’m debatably a lady, my novel is beyond all debate extremely silly.”

Padua is right: Her book is silly. But it didn’t have to be. She might have written a different book, even a funny one, that didn’t insist on the triviality of the enterprise, reducing her characters and the history they inhabit to wacky caricature. In her last chapter, Padua throws up her hands: “In any case, you might as well say that neither Babbage nor Lovelace actually either invented the computer or programmed it. The Analytical Engine was never built, and our heroes, in the end, are just footnotes to history.” These words, needless to say, appear in a ­footnote.

Lauren Redniss’s new book, “Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future,” will be published in October.